A Recap Of My Earth Day Contribution

My first ever ride to work on my bike went very well. The weather was great and so was the ride. I was surprised to find that riding my bike only took me an additional 10 minutes. I guess sitting at stops lights consumes a lot of time and makes up a large portion of my regular commute.

In addition to polluting less and saving money on gas, riding in gives me an extra kick in the morning. When I get to work I feel great and am ready to go. Usually I don’t feel that way until I’ve had some time to settle in and have a cup of coffee.

As long as the weather cooperates and gas hovers around $4/gallon, I’ll continue riding my bike to work at least three times per week.

How about you? Are you changing your routine now that gas seems set to hit the magic $4/gallon mark?

April 23, 2008 | Filed Under Bicycle Commuting, environment | Leave a Comment 

Cleaning Out The Mailbox, Saving Companies Money and Reducing Waste

Who sold my information?

That’s a question my wife and I often ask each other. Several times a week, or so it seems, we receive a new catalog from some company — JCrew, LL Bean, a random home furnishings store we’ve never heard of. It’s always fun to look through them and pick out what we would buy if we were trying to get back into debt.

The point is, we don’t need all these catalogs we never requested. And so we’ve tried to put a stop to them by calling some of the companies and requesting that we be taken off the mailing lists. Yeah, right - it couldn’t be that easy. Catalogs still flood our mailbox.

Being amateurs of the “remove our names from your mailing lists game,” we failed to get the results we expected. So it appears that we’ll have to enlist the help of a professional. In this case, that professional is Catalog Choice, a free service that helps you get your name removed from mailing lists. The process seems simple: sign up, find the catalogs you no longer want to receive and sit back and see (or in this case, you won’t see) the results. As a bonus, if you continue receiving unwanted catalogs after you use the service, they will follow up with the merchant.

So I’m off to sign up for Catalog Choice.

In a follow up post, I will review the process and the effectiveness of this service. Wish us luck!

March 25, 2008 | Filed Under Organization, environment | 2 Comments